Stanford CS329Z: Hand-Build the Agent with litellm First, Then Let DSPy Take It Away
CS329Z is a new three-unit agent engineering course debuting at Stanford in Autumn 2026. Its first homework asks you to build RAG, tool calling and a ReAct loop from scratch with litellm, then rewrite the same components in DSPy and hand in the comparison. The course site lives in a public GitHub repo, and the commit log shows the assignment count dropping from three to two in mid-August — the one that got cut was 'Data for Agents'.